Well we spent most of the weekend trying to figure out our benchmarks results – would Windows 7 be able to beat Windows XP in raw speed and performance? Here is that tale of the table:
| Speed Comparison: Windows 7 versus Windows XP | ||
| Test | Windows 7 | Windows XP |
| Copy 800MB file from USB | 29sec | 27sec |
| Copy 800MB file to USB | 59sec | 52sec |
| Copy 800MB file to file | 25sec | 28sec |
| Copy 430MB directory USB to drive | 31 sec | 68sec |
| Create 120,000 line .sql file using PHP | 6sec | 12 sec |
| Insert 120,000 records into MySQL Table SQL | 46 min 05sec | 140sec |
| Select 120,000 records with filterand group by | <1 sec | < 1 sec |
| Insert 60,000 records into MySQL Supplier Table | 24min 11sec | 68sec |
| Insert 60,000 records into MySQL Supplier Table SQL | 275sec | 16sec |
| Insert 60,000 records into MySQL Supplier Table PHP | 291sec | 18sec |
| Left Join between Product and Supplier Tables | <1 sec | <1 sec |
| Premiere Elements Boot up | 29 sec | 25sec |
| Premiere Elements Analyze Scene | 200 sec | 190sec |
| Premiere Elements write FLV 10min clip 640 x 480 | 630sec | 428sec |
| Photoshop CS3 First Boot up | 14sec | 12sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Smart Blur 14MPixel image | 16sec | 12sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Finishing Impressionist 14MPixel image | 9sec | 6sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Finishing Filter Gallery 14MPixel image | 15sec | 9sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Finishing \impressionist 24MPixel image | 31sec | 25sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Crop, Resize, Shape, Color Correct | <1 sec | <1 sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Brighteness, Exposure, Sharpen | <1 sec | <1 sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Topaz Smart Sharpen 26MPixel image | 20sec | 18sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Reshape 26MPixel image | 160sec | 154sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Texture Finishing 26MPixel image | 44sec | 36sec |
Green shows the faster performer and red marks where the speed of a system is 2 or more times slower than the other. Two things are obvious from these benchmarks. Windows XP on a 2.26GHz Dual Core PC with 3GB of RAM plus a 250GB hard drive consistently outperforms Windows 7 on 2.10GHz Dual Core PC with 4GB of RAM plus a 500GB SATA hard drive.
Well of course Windows XP does, it has a faster CPU. Well, not exactly.
I looked up the Passmark ratings of the two CPUs and the Windows XP Dual Core is rated at 1046 while the Windows 7 is rated at 1251. So Windows 7’s CPU should have a 19.6% speed advantage over the Windows XP PC – but XP consistently outperforms Windows 7 even with 1GB less of memory available. But what is of real concern is the very poor performance of Windows 7 doing Web development tasks. PHP and MySQL ran significantly slower in Windows 7 using a XAMPP provided Apache-MySQL–PHP server combo. So I had to drag out PHPed and Xdebug to profile and debug the problems. To date I do not have any solutions or insights.
I was going to do some AutoCAD, Corel Draw, Java, JavaScript, Oracle and PostgreSQL benchmarking but the the Windows 7 problems with PHP and MySQL forced a delay in game penalty. If any readers have insights into the Windows 7 problems with PHP and/or MySQL please post a comment.
Summary of Benchmarks
On one hand Windows 7 on a Gateway with a 17.3 inch screen at $650 Canadian [before taxes] is a pleasure to work with. Users will have plenty of room to work in. And the new Windows 7 taskbar makes moving among apps a lot easier. The system had close to XP-like Boot up, Shutdown and Start-up or Hibernate restore times. And copy operations [ notably faster than XP] and open file popups are not painfully slow like in Vista. Also I have yet to run into the annoying Vista roller-coaster performance lags [bright and peppy for 20 minutes then slow as molasses in January for the next 25, then back to …..]. But I have to admit, it is galling to have to endure a 5-20% performance hit in photo and video editing when the new Windows 7 machine should be delivering the very opposite in performance.